Search engines are commonly used by Internet users to acquire information. One type of search engine that is used in ecommerce platforms is a category based search engine. On such a platform, the user enters query keywords, which correspond to one or more categories such as sports, entertainment, etc. The typically category based search engine can accurately narrow a search scope and recommend related products to the user so long as it is able to accurately identify a category corresponding to search keyword. Some category based search engines use a lookup table, such as a mapping table of query keywords and industry categories. An example of such a mapping table is shown in Table 1.
TABLE 1Query wordCategory 1Category 2Category 3electric bikeTransportationSports &Automobiles &EntertainmentMotorcycles. . .. . .. . .. . .
For example, if the user enters query words “electric bike”, the search engine will locate the query words in the mapping table and then return three matching categories to the client, so the user can select one among the three categories and thus will search in that category of interest to him or her through the search engine and receive a search result returned from the search engine.
In category based search engines, since both the query data and the corresponding categories in the mapping table are established manually, the query words that can be processed may be limited to the number of the categories to which the query data belongs in the mapping table, and the search engine can return the search result to the user only if the query words entered by the user match the query data in the mapping table. Consequently, this search method in the prior art offers a low coverage rate of the search data. Also, since both the query data and the corresponding categories in the mapping table are established manually, the maintenance cost of the mapping table tends to be high. Further, the original mapping table has to be updated or reconstructed if any industry category is revised, thus resulting in poor expansibility.